It was contrary to his received ideas of propriety, that Mrs. Fleming should come in contact with the peasantry on his estate, whom he never condescended to see, except at Christmas, or on some family occasion, when he would imitate older territorial proprietors, by regaling them in his hall or in his park.

Her mother lived but a very short time to enjoy the fruit of the sacrifice, which was thus rendered useless; yet Agnes still made an exemplary wife, though the pallid cheek and attenuated form bespoke the deep inroad which unrequited feeling was gradually making upon her constitution.

Perhaps there is nothing more wearing to the mind than that attention to minutiæ which meets one at every turning; nothing so harassing to the feelings of a warm and generous heart, teeming with all the best impulses of human nature, as to be trammelled with perpetual ceremony, and to be compelled to watch one's looks and words with a lynx-eyed attention, lest something escape that may not be strictly correct according to the established code of punctilious politeness.

Again, to have a confiding, affectionate disposition; to feel in one's heart the soif d'aimer, and to find the only person who has a legal title to these affections, so cold as to be incapable of exciting them, and unable to appreciate them, is sufficient to wear away the strongest heart, and in time to undermine the strongest constitution.

The birth of her children opened a source of delight to her; but this was again stopped by the many ceremonies which attended their education, and by the thousand absurd ideas which Mr. Fleming had imbibed, with regard to the children of people of a certain rank.

In short, Mr. Fleming was a man of mere minutiæ and ceremony; his very soul had felt the influence of his dancing master, and seemed to have been put in the stocks with his feet. He attempted to form himself upon the model of Chesterfield, according to the letter, and not according to the spirit of his system; and became a perfect specimen of an iced man.

His religion and hospitality were all mere ceremony without devotion or heartiness. His ideas of the one were satisfied by the exhibition of his person, and by making the responses in an audible voice, in a crimson-lined pew from a morocco-bound prayer-book; and the duties of the other

CHAPTER V.

WATERING-PLACES.

enry.-I tell you, sir, the town's a bore :—there's not a bipe eet, or a quadruped in the Park; not a breakfast-table occupie a-tree, nor a newspaper read at White's; not a ray of fashion scandal from Hanover Square to Grosvenor Gate,—All the w me to Brighton.

MODERN CO

NG the many follies of Fashion, "leader of a chatter which have influenced society in modern times, n oned the absolute necessity there is, for leaving qu ble and comfortable homes, to resort at a cert of the year, to some water-drinking or sea-bath In the days of the Spectator, and up to the mid last century, a periodical retreat from London in the Pump-room at Bath, or walk on the Pantile lge Wells, was considered quite the ton among set of the then exclusives of society;-all the rest, m and more prudently, quitted their parliamentary sojo don, only to benefit their tenants and neighbourho ding the recess, as English noblemen and gentlem o do, upon their own estates; while the shop of an and counting-house of the merchant genera the boundaries of their ambition.

tinent; nor so many merchants and tradesmen figuring away in the Gazette. Those were the days when fat oxen turned entire upon the spit, and barrels of old October flowed among a joyous and hard-working peasantry, when the heir came to the age of twenty-one.

Those were the days, when the squire and his spouse, or the lord and his lady, were the "Bountifuls" of the village in which their mansion was situated; when four or six long-tailed, sleek, and well-fed horses drew the family to church on a Sunday morning, guided by a coachman nearly as fat as his cattle, and dressed in a little curly flaxon wig, with a hat forming a triangle, the square of whose hypothenuse was equal to the square of the two sides.

Those were the times, when the steward's rent-day was held in the hall, where large joints of beef and mutton, and flagons of ale and stoups of wine graced the side-tables for the refreshment of the tenants; and when the rent-day generally found the said tenants with smiling faces and adequate purses to meet the moderate demands of the landlord: or should any unforeseen calamity, any great expense arising from sickness, or bad crops, have made the rent-money short, why the tenant came with what he could scrape together, and the remainder was either remitted, or a convenient day for payment named, according to the circumstances. The landlord too, in those days, was often there to shake his tenantry by the rough hands which cultivated his estate-to inquire into their affairs-ask after their dames and their families, and pay those thousand little attentions so grateful to the humble from the exalted: and the few who felt the payment of their rent a hardship, were thus frequently sent away conciliated and satisfied, and overflowing with praises of the squire's kindness.

The landholder's wealth in those times circulated around its source the benefit of the landlord and tenant was mutual; the latter calculated on a certain profit to be made from the custom of the family at the hall, and this gave the former a greater certainty of his rents. The landlord, too, knew his own tenantry, and the value of his own estate from his own inspection, and not through the medium of a steward or solicitor, whose sole aim in its administration is to feather his own nest at the expense of both parties.

Such a secession as this from the life which his rank or public business compelled him to lead in London during the

season, added to his power in the county, and to his general respectability; while it saved a country gentleman from needless expenditure. But those days are gone by :-Fashion deemed it better to fly from the shade of the oaks and groves of their ancestors to scorch on the arid cliffs of the ocean. -Physicians wrote up the benefits of sea-bathing :--speculators built houses, warm-baths, libraries, and assemblyrooms, for the accommodation of visters. The pursuits of a London season were transferred to the sea-side; and a London winter was seldom finished without a series of engagements to meet at some of the mushroom wateringplaces, with which the coast of England has been covered within these last fifty years.

Large family-mansions with their splendid halls and staircases, oak dining-parlours, well-furnished libraries, and magnificient saloons, are shut up and deserted, for miserably buiit square houses with thin walls, through which the sun and rain penetrate, perpendicular montagne-russe staircases, that threaten the inhabitants with a dislocation of their necks,windows without shutters, and with sashes that rattle in every gust of wind till they make one's teeth clatter in unison,boards that creak with every footstep-and furniture purchased in Moorfields, or Broker's Row; and yet their temporary inhabitants are content with these sorry accommo dations, or rather with this absolute want of accommodation, merely because Fashion has prescribed a residence at a watering-place. Yes; those who would scarcely feel themselves easy in London, or their own mansion, or any fauteuil or Boethema, that was not turned out by an Orchard, a Gillow, a Graham, or a Tatham, are content with chairs, the seats of which would scarcely serve for the perch of a sparrow; with a sofa, whose cushions would be considerably benefited by Macadamisation; beds with scarcely enough feathers to cover half a dozen stubble geese; and pillows as flat as hamsandwiches.

The mania, however, did not long confine itself to fashionable circles; those were followed by the professional man and the merchant, and these again by the shopkeeper, until there is hardly a grade of society, a portion of which does not migrate for the summer to some watering-place.

Those, who were formerly content with a lodging at Kentish town or Stockwell, must now go to Brighton, or Worthing, or Margate; and their suburban lodgings are occupied

by those who never, in the olden time, thought of any thing in the way of country, but a pot of mignionette or a scarletrunner in the window, and an occasional saunter to Primrose Hill on a Sunday. Primrose Hill is, however, no longer out of town: the buildings of the Regent's park have extended to its very base. The poor citizen must go a day's journey from his confined place of business before he gets into fresh air or a green field; and a Sunday hack founders from fatigue, if hired from the middle of the Metropolis, before he gets on to a regular dusty, thorough-paced turnpike-road.

The cits, therefore, take their country pleasures not by retail as formerly, but in the lump; and so make a month's excursion to some gay and dashing watering-place, where they elbow their betters, and escape unknown.

The choice of the place in which this annual sojourn shall be made, is as various as the occupation of those who make them.

Your upper shopkeeper and his wife, who have been saving a per-centage out of the till with the view to this excursion, which makes them the envy of their less rich or more prudent neighbour, who confines the summer pleasures of himself and spouse to Highbury Barn and Kentish town, choose Margate; not only because it presents more entertainment in balls, theatres, and libraries, but because the convenience of the hoy affords a cheap facility of keeping an eye on the till, and of seeing how matters go on at the shop, at the expense of a very few shillings, and not much sea-sickness.

Your stockbroker chooses Brighton, because he can run down the fifty-four miles after Change, and be in town in the morning, time enough for all the Bulls and Bears, his contemporaries and opponents in the art of buying for money and the account.

Your "would be" genteel people, who would feel ashamed in the ensuing winter to answer the question of "Where did you go last summer?" with the word "Margate," choose Ramsgate; that the vulgar pleasures of the other place may be within their occasional reach, to vary the ennui and constraint of Ramsgate gentility.

Young ladies and lovers prefer Worthing, Eastbourne, and the quieter places; which now afford, along the coast, little neat lodgings with dimity beds, pink curtains,(white fronts, green doors, brass knockers, and Venetian blinds, and torm the very places for flirtation.